Brandon Webb > Quotes

“Whatever it is that you do, you are making a stand, either for excellence or for mediocrity.”
― Brandon Webb, The Red Circle: My Life in the Navy SEAL Sniper Corps and How I Trained America's Deadliest Marksmen

“You may never shoot a sniper rifle. You may never serve as part of an assault team, or stand security in combat, or board a hostile ship at midnight on the high seas. You may never wear a uniform; hell, you may never even throw a punch in the name of freedom. I’ll tell you what, though. Whatever it is that you do, you are making a stand, either for excellence or for mediocrity. This is what I learned about being a Navy SEAL: it is all about excellence, and about never giving up on yourself. And that is the red circle I will continue to hold, no matter what.”
― Brandon Webb, The Red Circle: My Life in the Navy SEAL Sniper Corps and How I Trained America's Deadliest Marksmen

“To me, this is one of the strongest marks of great leadership. Nobody is always right. Great leaders use that to learn and improve, instead of fighting it.”
― Brandon Webb, The Red Circle: My Life in the Navy SEAL Sniper Corps and How I Trained America's Deadliest Marksmen

“In political matters I have always been a down-the-middle-line person. When it comes to leaders, I care less about their party affiliation and more about their character and competence. I don’t care how they would vote on school prayer or abortion or gay marriage or gun laws. I want to know that they know what the hell they’re doing, and that they are made of that kind of unswerving steel that will not be rattled in moments that count, no matter what is coming at them. I want to know that they won’t flinch in the face of debate, danger, or death.”
― Brandon Webb, The Red Circle: My Life in the Navy SEAL Sniper Corps and How I Trained America's Deadliest Marksmen

“If intellectual capacity is a sniper’s foremost qualification, the number two trait is patience. We will take out any enemy we have to when the situation calls for it, whether that means using a rifle, a handgun, a knife, or our bare hands. Yet the sniper’s fundamental craft is not killing a person, but being able to get close enough to do so. Osman and I were on a classic sniper stalking mission: track, sneak up, observe, and disappear again, leaving no trace behind.”
― Brandon Webb, The Red Circle: My Life in the Navy SEAL Sniper Corps and How I Trained America's Deadliest Marksmen

“The sniper is like a highly skilled surgeon, practicing his craft on the battlefield. Make no mistake: War is about killing other human beings, taking out the enemy before he takes us out, stopping the spread of further aggression by stopping those who would perpetuate that aggression. However, if the goal is to prosecute the war in order to achieve the peace, and to do so as fast and as effectively as possible, and with the least collateral damage, then warriors like Chris Kyle and our other brothers-in-arms are heroes in the best sense.”
― Brandon Webb, The Red Circle: My Life in the Navy SEAL Sniper Corps and How I Trained America's Deadliest Marksmen

“What Sands told him that changed the course of his life boiled down to this: If your environment and circumstances control your attitude, you’re in prison. If you are in control of your thoughts and your attitude, then you’re free.”
― Brandon Webb, The Killing School: Inside the World's Deadliest Sniper Program

“Conventional wisdom is not always wrong—but it’s always suspect.”
― Brandon Webb, Total Focus

“common to every one of these top performers: complete and total confidence (“I will win no matter what”), combined with rigorous, consistent, meticulous mental rehearsal (“and this is exactly what it will look like and feel like”).”
― Brandon Webb, Total Focus

“In April 2009 we all watched entranced on CNN as a Navy SEAL sniper team fired three simultaneous shots, instantly executing the three pirates who had kidnapped a U.S. shipping captain off the Somali coast. From the moment they were mobilized, it took that sniper team less than ten hours to deploy, get halfway around the world, parachute with full kit at 12,000 feet into darkness and plunge into the deep waters of the Indian Ocean, rendezvous with waiting U.S. Naval forces, and complete their mission, start to finish.”
― Brandon Webb, The Red Circle: My Life in the Navy SEAL Sniper Corps and How I Trained America's Deadliest Marksmen

“The historical significance of the fact that we were going out on a joint raid with German Special Operations was lost on none of us. The last time the Germans were on a battlefield was in World War II, and then we were on opposite sides of the trenches. Ditto in World War I. Hell, there were Hessian mercenaries arrayed against us in the Revolutionary War. This would be the first military mission with German and American forces working together since … well, since ever.”
― Brandon Webb, The Red Circle: My Life in the Navy SEAL Sniper Corps and How I Trained America's Deadliest Marksmen

“The problem with negative reinforcement is that you are essentially programming your student to fail. I wanted to program them to be successful—no matter what.”
― Brandon Webb, The Killing School: Inside the World's Deadliest Sniper Program

“Then there are the sheep—good people, everyday people who go about their lives, able to do so in safety only because they are protected from the wolves. For the most part, they are not aware of the wolves, or that they are being protected from them. They may not even really believe that there are wolves out there, ready to cause them harm. But there are. And sheepdogs are acutely aware of it.”
― Brandon Webb, Among Heroes: A U.S. Navy SEAL's True Story of Friendship, Heroism, and the Ultimate Sacrifice

“Back in Afghanistan, when snipers from the other countries’ Special Operations teams were asking Osman and me over to debrief them after Zhawar Kili, I’d befriended a very sharp Danish sniper named Henning, from the Danish Frogman Corps. Now Henning was running the sniper training in Denmark, and he flew over to the States, went through our advanced courses, then took what he’d learned and implemented it in Denmark.”
― Brandon Webb, The Red Circle: My Life in the Navy SEAL Sniper Corps and How I Trained America's Deadliest Marksmen

“The only way you can successfully and consistently focus on your business is if you maintain your health, your family, your relationships, and all the rest of what makes you a human being in a healthy state of balance.”
― Brandon Webb, Total Focus

“Because here is the bottom line on fear: If you don’t know what matters, fear will take over, pin you, and hold you down. If you’re crystal clear on what matters, fear will propel you forward. It’s really that simple.”
― Brandon Webb, Mastering Fear: A Navy SEAL's Guide

“The B-52 was flying so high it was invisible to us, but I knew exactly what was happening up there: They were dropping the first bomb. When you are this close to a big explosion it rocks your chest cavity. You want to make sure your mouth is open so the contained impact doesn’t burst your lungs. Brad got the call: We were seconds from impact. We opened our mouths, dropped and rolled.”
― Brandon Webb, The Red Circle: My Life in the Navy SEAL Sniper Corps and How I Trained America's Deadliest Marksmen

“During the briefings their current hyper-conservative rules of engagement had been drilled into them. “And if you screw up,” the briefers added, “they will prosecute you.” Oh boy. Operation Hopeless had left our military planners gun-shy. Gun-shy. Haha. That was the right term, all right. To bring the point home, some of the marines had been armed with various “nonlethal technologies”—pepper sprays, flashbangs, and guns that shot a sticky foam in place of actual bullets—“to fill the gap between verbal warnings and deadly force,” went the official reasoning.”
― Brandon Webb, The Killing School: Inside the World's Deadliest Sniper Program

“where you are literally unaware of everything outside your field of attention. That’s not focus; that’s being an ostrich with your head in the sand. Otherwise known as blissful denial. In business, also known as suicide. You have to stay aware of it all and at the same time be totally focused. Like most truths that really matter, it’s a paradox”
― Brandon Webb, Total Focus

“Is business all about the money? Of course not. It’s about innovation and ingenuity, about coming up with new and better ways of doing things. It’s about making people’s lives better. Exercising the incredible creativity of the human spirit. And it’s about hitting your number: giving you what you need so you can design the life you want and take care of the people you care about.”
― Brandon Webb, Total Focus

“If something scares me, it means there’s magic on the other side.”
― Brandon Webb, Mastering Fear: A Navy SEAL's Guide

“Here's how we're going to teach. If you see your student doing something wrong, you give him a positive correction. Not a negative correction. Instead of telling him *not* to do what he's doing wrong, identify the fundamental he needs to be implementing, and remind him to do that.”
― Brandon Webb, The Killing School: Inside the World's Deadliest Sniper Program

“They taught us how to work off a curriculum, how to structure a class, how to gauge how the different students were doing and support slower ones in picking up the pace without browbeating them. They taught us it was okay to pause and gather our thoughts without filling in the empty space with an “Um”; how to ask questions without shotgunning or drilling students to the point where we’d embarrass them or make them uncomfortable; how to encourage students to ask their own questions and get them thinking so they absorbed material instead of just parroting it back.”
― Brandon Webb, The Red Circle: My Life in the Navy SEAL Sniper Corps and How I Trained America's Deadliest Marksmen

“choose one thing, focus on that one thing, and execute it to the absolute limit of your abilities. Focus on your career, invest in yourself, and learn how to say no to everything else.”
― Brandon Webb, Total Focus

“individuals will exhibit a level of engagement with his or her business that borders on the obsessive.”
― Brandon Webb, Total Focus

“There’s a point where work takes precedence, and whenever that point comes, you know you simply have to lock the doors and rivet yourself on getting the job done. And there’s a time when you have to shift your attention to your family, your kids, your girlfriend or boyfriend, your circle of friends.”
― Brandon Webb, Total Focus

“If you want to make world-class decisions, you need to be fit, healthy, and rested. There’s no way around it, no shortcut, no “hack.”
― Brandon Webb, Mastering Fear: A Navy SEAL's Guide

“Here is what I’ve learned on the field of battle, both as a SEAL and as a CEO: Stay focused— Keep keenly attuned to everything going on around you— Practice violence of action— Hold fast to a standard of absolute excellence— Embrace the suck— Honor and value your team— Lead from the front—”
― Brandon Webb, Total Focus

“Purpose” is a powerful word; it comes from an Old French word, purpos, meaning aim or intention. To be “on purpose” is “to aim accurately.”
― Brandon Webb, Total Focus

“The food you eat, the clothes you wear, the music you listen to. The shows and films you watch. The words and sentences you speak. The quality of your relationships. You should be a connoisseur of greatness.”
― Brandon Webb, Total Focus